Su Li Chong – författare

Weaving outwards from a centripetal force of biographical stances, this book presents the collective perspectives of literacy researchers from Brunei, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Taiwan. It represents the first all-Asian initiative to showcase the region’s post-colonial, multilingual and multicultural narratives of literacy education. This book provides a much-needed platform that initiates important conversations about literacy as a sociocultural practice in a region that is both challenged and shaped by sociocultural influence unique to Asia’s historical and geopolitical trajectory. Driven by the authors’ lived experiences of becoming literate as well as their empirical research work in later years, each chapter brings decades of biographical narratives and collective empirical research findings to bear. Within the book are negotiations about literacy across and within home and school contexts; transactions of literature, text and reader; and considerations of the literacy policy-practice nexus. These trajectories, while divergent in their issues, come together as shared lived experience located in local contexts considered through global perspectives. As Asia looks set to become the 21st century’s new economic and labour force, the need to understand the sociocultural milieu of this region cannot be understated. This book on literacy education in Asia contributes to the larger narrative.

Weaving outwards from a centripetal force of biographical stances, this book presents the collective perspectives of literacy researchers from Brunei, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Taiwan. It represents the first all-Asian initiative to showcase the region’s post-colonial, multilingual and multicultural narratives of literacy education. This book provides a much-needed platform that initiates important conversations about literacy as a sociocultural practice in a region that is both challenged and shaped by sociocultural influence unique to Asia’s historical and geopolitical trajectory. Driven by the authors’ lived experiences of becoming literate as well as their empirical research work in later years, each chapter brings decades of biographical narratives and collective empirical research findings to bear. Within the book are negotiations about literacy across and within home and school contexts; transactions of literature, text and reader; and considerations of the literacy policy-practice nexus. These trajectories, while divergent in their issues, come together as shared lived experience located in local contexts considered through global perspectives. As Asia looks set to become the 21st century’s new economic and labour force, the need to understand the sociocultural milieu of this region cannot be understated. This book on literacy education in Asia contributes to the larger narrative.

This edited volume is a systematic collection of research initiatives in the qualitative research paradigm. It showcases how researchers in Malaysia, who are often expected to acquiesce to mainstream ways of designing, conducting and disseminating research, rise above methodological hegemony to carve out a different but meaningful path in order to represent the voice of the voiceless.

In this book, accounts of paradigmatic shifts, applications of philosophical rigour and attention to values-laden inquiry demonstrate how qualitative research can be successfully conducted and reported, revealing insights which profoundly re-shape research design and address ethical sensitivities in social research. The conclusions drawn from the chapters form the rallying cry of qualitative researchers who acknowledge that it is their responsibility to enlighten those who are gatekeepers to the national research agenda, about the strength and legitimacy of the qualitative research paradigm. From a global standpoint, this book functions as a foil to show how in a context not systematically underpinned by critical dialogues of Western philosophy nor the ideology of research paradigms, significant considerations positioned within Eastern concepts of knowledge production can still thrive. The integration of both Eastern and Western perspectives at the crossroads of Asian-based qualitative research offers important lessons that are useful for supervisory, teaching and learning purposes.

This volume will be relevant to qualitative research methodology educators and researchers from across the Sciences and Humanities as well as practitioners in any industry that involves human thought and behaviour.